Photographs With An Eye On Mexico On View In Museum’s Julien Levy Gallery From July 26-december 7, 2003

Mexico's ancient cultures, varied landscapes, lively folk traditions and exuberant urban
scenes provide the fertile sources of inspiration for 27 artists represented in Eye on Mexico:
Photographs from the Collection, on view in the Julien Levy Gallery of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art through December 7, 2003.

The installation brings together for the first time more than 60 portraits, landscapes, and
modernist compositions from the Museum’s collection. It spotlights photographs by Mexican
artists including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, his first wife Lola Álvarez Bravo, Emilio Amero,
Graciela Iturbide and Mariana Yampolsky, as well as images by photographers born outside the
country, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Paul Strand, Danny Lyon, and others.

"These photographs comprise a rich and fascinating aspect of our fine holdings," said
Katherine Ware, the Museum’s Curator of Photographs. "Some of the works are famous images
familiar to our audiences while others are little known. Taken together this group conveys a
multi-dimensional portrait of Mexico, full of surprising perspectives from within and outside this
rich and varied culture."

Six works represent the country’s foremost photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. As a
young man in the 1920s, he began using the camera both to explore social contradictions he
observed in Mexico City and to express his own poetic sensibility. His embrace of photography
coincided with a period of heightened social and artistic activity, sometimes called the Mexican
Renaissance. This cultural flourishing emerged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1910-1920
and attracted numerous artists, writers, and musicians from the U.S. and Europe to the country.
Álvarez Bravo met and exchanged ideas with many of these visitors, including Edward Weston,
Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. His photographs were collected by New
York art dealer Julien Levy in the 1930s and several works on view are from the recently
acquired Julien Levy collection of photographs. By the time he died in 2002 at the age of 100,
Álvarez Bravo had achieved an international reputation as one of the great figures of 20thcentury
photography.

One of Álvarez Bravo’s most famous students is Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942), who
worked as his assistant in the early 1970s. Like her teacher, she explores issues of Mexican
identity and diversity, but as she often lives among her subjects while working, they convey a
particularly personal voice. She frequently documents such indigenous peoples as the Seri of
Northern Mexico and the Zapotecs of Juchitán in their daily and ceremonial activities and her
work often emphasizes the synthesis of both ancient and popular culture that is commonplace in
Mexico. The Museum mounted the first U.S. retrospective of Iturbide’s work in 1998.

The exhibition features works by prominent photographers from outside Mexico who
were drawn to the country’s cultural renaissance in the 1920s and '30s. In 1923, American
Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Italian expatriate Tina Modotti (1896-1942) went to Mexico
for a period of several years. Modotti began her photographic career there while Weston
struggled away from his Pictorialist roots toward a sharper, modernist vision. In 1925, he wrote
in his Daybooks, "I might call my work in Mexico a fight to avoid its natural picturesqueness."
Captivated by the apparent purity and spontaneity of indigenous crafts, the two artists
photographed vernacular pottery, painted gourds, and straw dolls for Mexican Folkways and
other periodicals. They became members of a circle of Mexican artists and intellectuals that
included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Weston’s striking portraits of Modotti and Rivera
(1923), are installed along with a 1938 portrait of Kahlo, on view for the first time, from an
intimate series taken in 1938 by Julien Levy (American, 1906-1981). Kahlo’s father Guillermo
(1872-1941), a German immigrant, supported his family as a studio photographer. From 1904 to
1908 he was commissioned to document the country’s colonial architecture, an example of
which can be seen in the exhibition.

German photographers Hugo Brehme (1882-1954) and Fritz Henle (1909-1993) became
permanent residents of Mexico in the 1930s. Brehme established a studio called Fotografia
Artistica Hugo Brehme, in which Álvarez Bravo and other Mexican photographers worked and
learned the fundamentals of photography, including the making of postcards that sustained the
studio financially. For more than 40 years, Brehme celebrated Mexico's natural beauty in his
landscapes and portraits of the Mexican people. Henle saw Mexico for the first time in 1936. For
the next ten years he documented the country’s revolution into modernism, contrasting pairs of
urban and rural views in his 1945 book Mexico.

The exhibition also demonstrates how the allure of Mexico has continued to attract
American photographers through the present day. Among the contemporary artists who have
been drawn to the subject of urban Mexico, with its power lines, exuberant color that extends
from storefronts to advertising, and street culture are Danny Lyon (b. 1952), Joel Meyerowitz (b.
1938), George Krause (b. 1937), and Laurence Salzmann (b. 1944).

Housing some 150,000 works of art, the Department of Prints, Drawings and
Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is nationally recognized for the breadth and
depth of its collections as well as the flair and scholarship of its exhibitions. The Department
presents rotating installations of its vast holdings in the Berman and Stieglitz Galleries and the
Julien Levy Gallery on the Museum’s ground floor and the Eglin Gallery on the first floor.
Individual works are also on view in the Museum’s permanent collection galleries.

RELATED EVENTS
Wednesday Nights at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Day of the Dead
October 29, 2003
Free with Museum admission

An evening of music, dance and gallery talks supported by the Mexican Cultural Center and the
Latin American Studies Program at Saint Joseph’s University.

Music: Claudia Martínez, a supple, imaginative musician and vocalist, found the vein that
awakened her creativity in the ancient world of the Zapotec, located in the valley of Oaxaca,
Mexico. Since then, she has continued to search the universe of the first Mesoamericans with
unending curiosity. Martínez uses the language and poetry of the indigenous writers, composers,
and poets as a source of inspiration to create sounds of a new era while echoing the magic of an
ancestral culture.

Up Close: Meet dancers and Artistic Director, Carla Maxwell, from The Limón Dance
Company, as they share the choreographic principles developed by José Limón and Doris
Humphrey, in an intimate lecture/performance.

We are Philadelphia’s art museum. A landmark building. A world-renowned collection. A place that welcomes everyone. We bring the arts to life, inspiring visitors—through scholarly study and creative play—to discover the spirit of imagination that lies in everyone. We connect people with the arts in rich and varied ways, making the experience of the Museum surprising, lively, and always memorable. We are committed to inviting visitors to see the world—and themselves—anew through the beauty and expressive power of the arts.

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